Mt. Hope School sews together as part of national project
Several students check out the mural sections that have come in from schools across the U.S. Many of the participating schools chose to focus on books while Mt. Hope centered around the community for its mural.
Recently, the entire student body at Mt. Hope School helped spread the story of Holmes County to several different states and to China when it participated in The Traveling Mural Project, a project from the mind of Shannon McClintock Miller, a teacher, librarian and international speaker from Iowa.
Lori Pringle, district library media specialist in East Holmes Local Schools, discovered the program while attending a national library conference and felt it would be an ideal way for the students to connect with kids from other parts of the U.S.
“We were involved in a traveling mural project, and each student and many staff helped create a mural that we then cut up into 10 slices,” Pringle said. “We sent a piece of our mural to nine other schools and kept a portion here at Mt. Hope. In turn, each participating school either has sent or is sending us a piece of their mural.”
In creating the program, Pringle had each of the 99 students from kindergarten through eighth grade design one square that would go on the mural. She said because of the importance of quilting in this area, she thought it would be an ideal theme to capture the essence of the children’s lives and life in Holmes County.
The theme for the mural was “Mt. Hope: A Stitch in Time.”
Because 114 squares were needed to complete the mural, Pringle had several of the staff members at Mt. Hope School add to the project.
“I told the kids to make their squares as colorful as possible to really make our mural exciting,” Pringle said. “It was very rewarding to see it all come together and to see their excitement.”
Pringle said the students came back with plenty of colorful squares that included things from their own lives such as family, farm life, softball and football, flags, books and wildlife, favorite foods, hunting and more.
“We had a really neat wide variety of squares that really captured a lot of what our students and community is all about,” Pringle said.
She said once the squares were assembled, it created a really neat, unique and colorful look at life in Holmes County.
“At first the kids were like, ‘What are we doing?’ but once we started getting them back in and developing our mural and we got the first part of the mural glued up, they got pretty interested and excited pretty fast,” Pringle said. “Then that first slice came in from one of the other schools, and we got really excited.”
Once the mural was complete, they had to cut it into 10 sections to send out to the participating schools in their group, which was group 11.
That task alone was harder than she imagined.
“It was hard for me to cut it up,” Pringle said. “I said to a couple of the seventh and eighth grade girls, ‘You have to help me cut it up. It’s such a masterpiece I can’t do it.’”
They did and shipped nine of the 10 sections off to the other participating schools.
Then they waited for the returns to come in, and one by one they did.
The murals that have come back from schools in places like Silver Lake Elementary in Kansas, Stonebridge Elementary in Alabama, Mocksville Elementary in North Carolina, Goshen Center School in Connecticut, Rangely Lake Regional School in Maine and others have created a slice of Americana that now hangs on the wall in the hallway at Mt. Hope Elementary.
“We’re actually still waiting for one from China,” Pringle said.
The themes from the other schools varied, many of them basing their themes on a book, others on their community.
Pringle said they have talked about and explored the various school areas through Google Map, so it became a bit of a geography lesson in the process.
Getting to share their own passions and their community with kids around the nation and even in China was an exciting undertaking.
In sending out their sections, Pringle included a small write-up explaining the uniqueness of Holmes County and in particular Mt. Hope.
In her letter she wrote, “Mt. Hope is a rural school with Amish and Mennonite students who end their schooling after the eighth grade due to religious beliefs. At the stop signed square of Mt. Hope, you’ll find several community businesses, horse-drawn buggies, or wagons and people walking or riding bikes for transportation. Each student and staff member designed a quilt square representing ourselves and our community.”
She said they chose quilting because of its unique bond to the community, and that was how this beautiful mural found its way many miles away, along with it becoming a connection between children they may never meet but with whom they now share a bond.